Crash: On Collision and Other Confrontations

Simulation enables us to understand, for
instance, how contemporary collective
memory is made up of television programs
instead of a shared notion of history.1

 Based on the novel by J.G. Ballard (1973), the film Crash directed by David Cronenberg illustrates the way people are subjectivized by the phenomena of the city. I am following Celeste Olalquiaga's reflections on her book entitled Megalópolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities2 concerning the relationship between contemporary cities and postmodern debates. The film Crash could be considered as one in which postmodern debates are dilucidated, particularly themes such as the immediacy of life, the search for even more intense emotions, and the transformation of our aesthetic sense in the direction of producing an aesthetic of destruction, of what is thought as ugly, of pain, and of death. These themes are presented as subjectivations produced by the phenomena of the city. The postmodern proposition of a subject, which is produced simultaneously with what appears to be its surroundings -its larger or immediate social context- is explored in this film in its connection with the themes identified above. As Celeste Olalquiaga stated:

 Defined as a disturbance in the relation between self and surrounding territory, psychasthenia is a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism's own body is confused with represented space...Urban culture resembles this mimetic condition when it enables a ubiquitous feeling of being in all places while not really being anywhere.3

 The film almost begins with a scene in which two characters, James and Catherine Ballard, are looking at the city from what appears to be the balcony of their own apartment. The recurrent scenery is that of endless expressways and the velocity of the vehicles. Velocity itself is erotized and mediates the search for intense emotions within the drama. The collision among cars, particularly rear-ended, appears as metaphor for the sexual encounters of characters. In the same way, the "actual"4 sexual encounters of people in the film are ones in which the act is performed rear-ended.

 The drama of the film also challenges the coordinates of the heterosexual matrix and the patriarchal regime since in the way most of the sexual encounters are conducted rear- ended, it incorporates an ambiguity, even a contest for signification, since you don't know what kind of sexual encounter is going on. The ambiguity of sex, the distance from the heterosexual matrix, is both part of the film game and the contextualization for the sexual encounter among men (James Ballard and Vaughan), and among women (Dr. Remington and Gabrielle). Beyond that, the way the dialogue between James and Vaughan is delivered, we can follow Baudrillard's reflections concerning the relationship between seduction and weakness. Baudrillard stated: "To seduce is to render weak. We seduce with our weakness, never with strong signs or powers. In seduction we enact this weakness, and this is what gives seduction its strength."5 The relationship between Vaughan and James is one of seduction. They seduced each other with their weakness; Vaughan seduces activating his fascination with car crashes and the breaking down of order, and James seduces with his obsession on sexual experiences.

 The postfeminist reflection of the film deals with the relationship between passion and death. As stated by George Bataille, "no-one today could deny that impulses connecting sexuality and the desire to hurt and to kill do exist."6 This relationship is illustrated by all sorts of different ways within the movie, particularly in a scene where the main female character, Catherine Ballard, have sex with Vaughan in the back of the car while her lover, James, is taking the vehicle through the car wash. On the one hand, the scene explores both the transgression and the pleasure connected with having sex in a car as opposed to the sex you could have in the relaxing context of your own bed. The scene suggests that the more difficult and the more painful, the better and more the pleasure! On the other hand, the scene is followed by another one in which Catherine appears in her bed with James. Both of them invoke Vaughan, and it allows them to have the most passionate sex in the movie. Vaughan and his car have to be there with them. He is like a catalyst that speeds the process up, makes it happen. At the same time, we can appreciate the wounds in Catherine's body, and how desirable they are for James.

 Although the relationship between passion and death is recurrently worked upon in literature, it has been totally obliterate in feminist reflections on so-called domestic violence. The postfeminist dimension of the film has to do with the ways the relation between passion and death is exposed as intrinsic to lover's relationship. The last scene of the film is particularly illustrative of this relationship. It presents that James was chasing Catherine with his car and, eventually, this erotization of velocity and vehicles provoke a collision in which Catherine got wounded. Although the "natural" response would be to call for an ambulance, James get close to her and while doing her rear-ended, he said: "Maybe the next on darling", implying that she wishes to be death and he was only satisfying her demand of love. What could be more intense than passion? Death itself.

 The aesthetic of destruction which has, as Celeste Olalquiaga stated, "a referent in the transformation of the city,"7 is illustrated in the fascination for car collisions from the part of Vaughan who took pictures of the different components of the collision scenery -destruction of vehicles, wounded people, blood and death- while perceiving these scenes as "great." The aesthetic of the ugly is also a component in the treatment of these scenes. In Baudrillards words, "Thus the obscene can seduce, as can sex and pleasure. Even the most anti-seductive figures can become figures of seduction..."8 The inteultiple times: self-mutilation when James and Vaughan went to get tattoos on their bodies, the erotization of scars and the characters' desire to kiss them, the sequential scenes where intentional accidents appeared conducted by bloody characters.

 The hyperreal is explored within segments of the drama itself particularly in contests of collisions in which people repeat "real life" collisions. The film has a fetishistic quality in the way characters keep returning to the moment of the accident. Their participation in the reenactment of famous car crashes, specifically the deaths of James Dean and Jayne Masfield -sort of a greatest hits of Hollywood's automotive tragedies- leads us to ask: do they repeat because some event or some symbolic object has become so full of meaning? Furthermore, when James Ballard buys the same car after the accident, is he hoping to experience the same thing again or to return to the way he was before the crash, or is a combination of both those things, a fear and a hope? A compulsive repetition which is thought to subjectivize people in the megalópolis: "instead of establishing coordinates from a fixed reference point, contemporary architecture fills the referential crash with repetition, subtituing for location an obsessive duplication of the same scenario."9 Compulsive repetition in which actual death is not an issue since the actual and the hyperreal are defuse in one single phenomena.

 A reflection on subject and technology is also mandatory since the figure of the cyborg is another powerful referent of this film, particularly, in the participation of a female character with legs prothesis. A sexual encounter went on with Gabrielle and James in which the "crack" sound produced when he "opened" her prothesis legs appears as a challenge to the audience which calls for a resignification not only of sex and desire but also for what qualifies as erotic sounds or not. In George Bataille's words: "...an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us profoundly."10 This scene proposes also both an aesthetic and an erotization of what is generally considered ugly or disgusting in the kissing and caressing of her scars from the part of James.

 It appears to me that the film is decidedly postmodern in the declination of the centrality of a narrated story and the importance it confers to issues presented with no necessary connection among them, privileging what is fragmented and descentered over a coherent and cohesive narrative.
 

"Yes, one runs towards one's fate all the
more surely by seeking to escape it.
Yes, everyone seeks his own death,
and the failed acts are the most successful...".11

 1. Bataille, Georges 1987 Erotism, Death and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

 2. Baudrillard, Jean 1979 Seduction. New York: St.Martin's Press.

 3. Olalquiaga, Celeste 1992 Megalópolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Oxford: University of Minnesota.
 
 

 1. Olalquiaga, Celeste 1992 Megalópolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, p. xix.

 2. Ibid.

 3. Ibid, p.1-2

 4. I used the word "actual" in quotations as substitute for "real" or more explicitly, for the sexual encounter of people as oppose for the "ones" of vehicles.

 5. Baudrillard, Jean 1979 Seduction. New York: St.Martin's Press, p.83.

 6. Bataille, Georges 1987 Erotism, Death and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, p.183.

 7. Olalquiaga, Celeste 1992 Megalópolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, p.7.

 8. Baudrillard, Jean 1979 Seduction. New York: St.Martin's Press, p.45.

 9. Olalquiaga, Celeste 1992 Megalópolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, p.2.

 10. Bataille, Georges 1987 Erotism, Death and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, p. 45.

 11. Baudrillard, Jean 1979 Seduction. New York: St.Martin's Press, p.72.